A couple of years ago I was reading Wikipedia's article about the the
1943 Bengal famine, and I was startled
by the following claim:

"If food is so scarce, why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?"

Winston Churchill's response to an urgent request to release food
stocks for India.

It was cited, but also marked with the “not in citation” tag, which
is supposed to mean that someone checked the reference and found that it did not
actually support the claim.

It sounded like it might be the sort of scurrilous lie that is widely
repeated but not actually supportable, so I went to follow it up. It
turned out that although the quotation was not quite exact, it was not
misleadingly altered, and not a scurrilous lie at all. The attributed
source (Tharoor, Shashi"The Ugly
Briton". Time,
(29 November 2010).) claimed:

Churchill's only response to a telegram from the government in Delhi
about people perishing in the famine was to ask why Gandhi hadn't
died yet.

I removed the “not in citation” tag, which I felt was very misleading.

Still, I felt that anything this shocking should be as well-supported
as possible. It cited Tharoor, but Tharoor could have been
mistaken. So I put in some effort and dug up the original source. It
is from the journal entry of Archibald
Wavell, then Viceroy of India, of 5 July
1944:

Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask why Gandhi hadn't died
yet! He has never answered my telegram about food.

This appears in the published version of Lord Wavell's journals. (Wavell,
Archibald Percival. Wavell: The Viceroy's journal, p. 78. Moon,
Penderel, ed. Oxford University Press, 1973.) This is the most
reliable testimony one could hope for. The 1973 edition is available
from the Internet
Archive.

A few months later, the entire article was massively overhauled by a
group of anglophiles and Churchill-rehabilitators. Having failed to
remove the quotation for being uncited, and then having failed to
mendaciously discredit the cited source, they removed the quotation in
a typical episode of Wikipedia chicanery. In a
5,000-word article, one sentence quoting the views of the then-current
British Prime Minister was deemed “undue weight”,
and a failure to “fairly represent all significant viewpoints that
have been published by reliable sources”.

An earlier article discussed how I
discovered that a hoax item in a Wikipedia list had become the
official name of a mountain, Ysolo Mons, on the planet Ceres.

I contacted the United States Geological Survey to point out the hoax,
and on Wednesday I got the following news from their representative:

Thank you for your email alerting us to the possibility that the name
Ysolo, as a festival name, may be fictitious.

After some research, we agreed with your assessment. The IAU and the Dawn
Team discussed the matter and decided that the best solution was to replace
the name Ysolo Mons with Yamor Mons, named for the corn/maize festival in
Ecuador. The WGPSN voted to approve the change.

This week we cleaned up a few relevant Wikipedia articles, including
one on Italian Wikipedia, and Ysolo has been put to rest.

I am a little bit sad to see it go. It was fun while it lasted. But
I am really pleased about the outcome. Noticing the hoax, following
it up, and correcting the name of this mountain is not a large or an
important thing, but it's a thing that very few people could have done
at all, one that required my particular combination of unusual
talents. Those opportunities are seldom.

[ Note: The USGS rep wishes me to mention that the email I quoted above
is not an official IAU communication. ]

Ysolo: festival marking the first day of harvest of eggplants in Tirana, Albania

(It now says “citation needed“; I added that yesterday.)

I am confident that this entry,
inserted in July 2012 by an anonymous user,
is a hoax. When I first read it, I muttered “Oh, what bullshit,” but
then went looking for a reliable source, because you never know. I
have occasionally been surprised in the past, but this time I found
clear evidence of a hoax: There are only a couple of scattered
mentions of Ysolo on a couple of blogs, all from after 2012, and
nothing at all in Google Books about Albanian eggplant celebrations.
Nor is there an article about it in Albanian Wikipedia.

To complete the magic circle of fiction, the Albanians might begin to
celebrate the previously-fictitious eggplant festival. (And why not?
Eggplants are lovely.) Let them do it for a couple of years, and then
Wikipedia could document the real eggplant festival… Why not fall
under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of
an ordered planet?

I think I may have found the single worst citation on Wikipedia. It's
in the article on sausage casing.
There is the following very interesting claim:

Reference to a cooked meat product stuffed in a goat stomach like a
sausage was known in Babylon and described as a recipe in the world’s
oldest cookbook 3,750 years ago.

That was exciting, and I wanted to know more. And there was a citation,
so I could follow up!

The citation was:

(Yale Babylonian collection, New Haven Connecticut, USA)

I had my work cut out for me. All I had to do was drive up to New
Haven and start translating their 45,000 cuneiform tablets until I
found the cookbook.

(I tried to find a better reference, and turned up the book The
Oldest Cuisine in the World: Cooking in Mesopotamia. The author,
Jean Bottéro, was the discoverer of the cookbook, or rather he was the
person who recognized that this tablet was a cookbook and not a
pharmacopoeia or whatever. If the Babylonian haggis recipe is
anywhere, it is probably there.)